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A blessing and curse all rolled into one. Before living at the ranch, rain was just something that made it a little difficult to navigate the parking lot in my open toed shoes or maybe we couldn’t eat dinner on the deck. It was never something that changed the course of my life or impacted my income.

Right now it is keeping us from combining the rest of our durum wheat. That would usually be ok, we could use a day or two to do other things, but at this time in the growing cycle the rain hurts the grain. I am not a specialist by any means, and I am not claiming to know anything, but in my opinion it is washing the life out of the kernel. Only a few weeks ago we were able to take plump golden wheat rated a #1 to be sold. Then before all of it was dry enough, or cured enough to cut, the rain came. Now my beautiful wheat is a paler yellow and is rated #3. What does this mean? Well it means to me that I don’t get paid as much.

It really makes me think back to when I found out that farmers spray their crops to desiccate them and how I thought that was horrible. Why would they spray chemical on the crop just to kill the plant and make the grain cure faster? Well I think I know the answer to that now that I have walked in the farmer shoes a little bit. Without getting into the dollar figures, a little bit of rain at the wrong time can literally mean making a living or going broke if the quality of your crop goes down. Maybe that is why they do it. It must be the reason.

Then my husband pointed out that there is crop insurance for this reason. So why spray then? I guess my walk in those shoes wasn’t long enough to understand all of this. Thankfully for us, if the grain quality goes down too much, we just feed it to the cows. They don’t care what the colour is. 🙂